


blue and permanent

by deerscarer



Series: blue and permanent [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Misogyny, Codependency, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gentleness, M/M, Multi, Pegging, Pining, Polyamory, Power Dynamics, Pre-Series, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:09:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25757884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deerscarer/pseuds/deerscarer
Summary: Pre-series. Jack and Anne imprint on Vane, and Vane has feelings which he can only express via violence at people he doesn’t care about, aka everyone but them.
Relationships: "Calico" Jack Rackham/Charles Vane, Anne Bonny/"Calico" Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny/"Calico" Jack Rackham/Charles Vane, Anne Bonny/Charles Vane
Series: blue and permanent [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1892200
Comments: 23
Kudos: 116





	blue and permanent

“And yet they hear the names they used  
like lures slipping over the pond:  
What are you waiting for  
come home, come home, lost  
in the waters, blue and permanent.”

** Louise Glück, “The Drowned Children” **

Sometimes, afterwards, when Jack is still trying to decide if he can walk out without a hitch in his step, he reflects on the strangeness of the arrangement.

For Jack, it’s understandable enough. He likes men. Some men, anyways. Men who are more powerful than him. And he likes the humiliation of submitting to them, especially when he finds them beneath him in everything else. These are personal eccentricities he made peace with long ago. 

What Vane’s in it for is less clear, though Jack doubts it’s anything more complicated than Jack presenting a willing body to fuck. It certainly isn’t his wit. A hand is firmly clasped over his mouth more often than not, which conveniently, Jack doesn’t mind. 

There are times like now, though, when it’s late, and the dimness of the cabin makes things feel more meaningful than they are. Jack is usually left to his own devices to straighten himself up and haul himself out, but tonight Vane is still lingering nearby, leaning against the table Jack was bracing on minutes before. 

The lantern overhead creaks with the movement of the ship.

Jack chances a glance at him while he buckles his belt. Vane's arms are crossed. He's looking at the floor. His expression, loosened by drink, isn’t exactly cruel. 

It’s times like these that things feel slightly more complicated.

In the clear light of morning Anne’s eyes fix on a nasty bite bruise, low on his neck. 

“Let me kill him.”

Jack has tried before to explain why, for reasons beyond him, he doesn’t exactly want that. It gets harder every time, to watch her disappointment edge near disgust. 

When she looks out over the waves—turquoise blue, they must be nearer to port than he’d thought—he can hear the faint shift of coin in her coat.

“You took it?” he asks, very casually. 

“Half.” 

Well. That doesn’t sound good. 

“When we land,” she continues, “don’t try to stop me.” 

The twist in Jack’s stomach is ice cold, even as he settles in, as always, to translate.

“All right,” he agrees, completely lost.

She says nothing else. He knows he’s lucky she hasn’t walked away already, which doesn’t help his mounting sense of panic.

For once, she doesn’t make him work for it.

“There’s no place for me in this.” 

Whatever he was expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. 

Her expression dares him to say it isn’t true. Not for the first time, he marvels at her ability to bury her fear. He’s fully prepared to leave the _Ranger_ and never look back; the decision would be easy. But he knows, already, that isn’t the crux of it.

“Well, to be honest I don’t know if that’s true, exactly,” he offers, as neutrally as possible. He leans against the rigging, squinting against the sun. “I get the impression that I’m, ah, not his usual fare.”

But her jaw is set, and she won’t look at him.

“He’s not interested in me,” she says, with an ease and finality that somehow strikes Jack as heartbreaking.

He looks at her. The glare off the water is blinding, but he can’t look away. 

The sharp outline of her face. The wind in her hair, the blue of her eyes. He wonders how anyone in the world couldn’t be in love with her. Completely, absurdly, head over heels. **  
**

“Fuck this shit,” Anne spits. 

Afternoon light streams through bubbled panes of glass. Vane is slung in a velvet chair at a desk, Jack is leaning against the wall, and Anne is planted in the middle of the room, ruining Jack’s fucking day.

The silence is oppressive. When Vane offers no immediate response, Anne sets her hands on her daggers. 

Jack clenches his jaw hard enough to hurt. He discreetly checks Vane’s expression with a dart of his eyes, and finds it somewhere between murderous and amused.

“Jack may as well be the quartermaster,” Anne presses. “He puts down more shit than you know. And I’m the only one with the balls to do the fucked up ugly shit in the vanguard, and you know it. A larger share. And not just from the next prize. From this one.” 

This is the most Anne has ever spoken to Vane. Since they joined his crew a year ago, since he caught them fucking behind the galley a few months later, and since, more recently, she learned he's fucking Jack too. 

If he’s surprised at the outburst, he doesn’t show it. It must say something for his character, Jack thinks, in the last part in his brain that isn’t screaming, that he isn’t reacting less charitably. Though Jack’s sure if Anne were louder—loud enough, maybe, for the rest of the crew to hear—and if the crew weren’t knee deep in booze and tits for the first time in months, Vane might be approaching the situation differently. 

He takes a slow, deliberate drag off his smoke.

“What share,” he says, “do you think would be reasonable?” 

“Two hundred extra for me. Two fifty for Jack.”

Vane snorts at that. Jack looks to the floor and prays. It’s some special kind of hell, to watch it happening and be unable to stop it. 

“If you don’t cut us in, I’m done,” Anne adds. Her hands twitch on her weapons—a nervous tic Jack hasn’t seen in years—but her voice is steady. 

_I’m done._ Not _we’re done._ Like she can't even speak for Jack anymore.

Suddenly, Jack gets it. God, he understands. But will Vane. He’s witless, and cruel, and Jack is not above looking at him like he’s looking at him right now, begging him to read between the fucking lines.

If Vane recognizes that Jack is pleading, he shows no sign of it.

Watching him stare Anne down, blueish smoke curling from his nose, is the longest minute of Jack’s life.

“Your shares will be increased,” Vane says finally, “in recognition of your… substantial contributions to this crew. Starting next prize, one hundred additional for Rackham, eighty for you, with a one-time bonus of preferred goods from this haul. Of my choosing.” 

Anne is impassive. But Jack can see a muscle leap in her jaw, the slight downward tug in her lips. She had prepared for every possibility, Jack thinks, but capitulation. 

She turns to storm out. 

“And Bonny,” Vane calls after her. She pauses at the door, angles her head back. Vane spares a lazy glance down at her knives. “Try that shit again, I take your fucking head.”

She shoves out of the doors. The sound of laughter and clinking mugs and music rushes in, a jarring intrusion of the real world. 

Vane’s eyes follow her as she leaves, then drift to Jack. 

Jack feels like he’s having an out-of-fucking-body experience. He’s _thrumming_. 

Vane gives him a long look, then tilts his head dismissively at the door. 

Jack goes after her.

After that, things almost go back to normal. 

Jack can tell Anne’s still furious, though not, exactly, at him—and to his surprise, not exactly at Vane. 

She’s still the first over the side. Still the first in the fray. She still follows Vane’s lead when it suits her, still backs his plays. She takes it out on the poor bastards who don’t surrender, mostly, and on Jack, to a lesser degree. She always stays close to him after, and sometimes touches his hair, and always makes sure that he came. 

Jack isn’t complaining. Never has. He’ll take everything she gives him. He’ll always ask for more.

For a while, the pattern holds.

After an unfortunate incident on the _Woolwich_ , they need recruits. Jack puts on his most impressive coat—robin egg blue, with only slightly dingy tassels—and does the usual rounds: tavern first, beach second, brothel third, then the slums. 

He manages to secure two gunners, a man who says he’s a carpenter (though Jack somewhat has his doubts), and most valuably, a new navigator, a Bristol man named Reed. 

Reed, it turns out, is an absolute shit. It’s weeks before Jack starts to sense a problem; weeks more for him to get his hand on the pulse of it. 

It starts with wayward comments. Not from Reed himself. He’s too smart for that. Reed is that special kind of insidious where the issue isn't apparent until he’s already wormed his way into places he can’t be cut out of, not without gutting the fucking ship. 

He wheedles. He suggests. He insinuates. And when his ideas come out of the mouths of other men, they truly believe they’re their own. Soon enough, Reed’s feelings are the feelings of every stupid brute on the _Ranger_ : Anne doesn’t belong on the ship. Anne is unnatural, and weak. Worst of all, Anne is embarrassing. Anne's got to go. 

He ventriloquizes these complaints with such skill that even when Jack can pinpoint exactly where the sound is coming from, he can do exactly nothing to stop it.

And just like that, the scales tip for them again, from neutral to shit as always. It’s the kind of thing that guts him. To hear the deafening silence when she sits down to eat, to see the return of the jeering looks her knives had done so much work to dispel. To know that his own pity or interference will only rob her of her last shreds of dignity. 

So he eats with her, and cajoles, and acts like there’s nothing wrong, and she accepts, and keeps her head down, and bears it, and they both pretend they have literally any options but this: a short stick with a rank crew who would turn on them in a moment, at any opportunity.

The men sneer at Jack, but they follow. They resent Anne, but she earns her keep. At least the two of them are on a ship. At least they’re free.

Reed is a loathsome sack of shit, but Jack can’t deny his utility. He’s a skilled navigator—of short supply in Nassau—better, even, than Featherstone, they say. The prizes come easy, with little damage to finances or otherwise. Jack is truly stricken, not only by the odiousness of the man, but the difficulty of finding someone who could replace him. 

Life, Jack tells himself, is made up of indignities like these. They’ve certainly seen worse. If they have to suffer, at least they'll suffer rich.

Anne is wounded when they take a Dutch tobacco ship, a curving slice up her bicep before she tears the man’s throat out. 

The wound is deep, and the current situation means she hides it, does her best not to favor it, refuses to let Jack look at it, even in whatever privacy they can manage. 

Once they’re back in Nassau, behind closed doors, Jack can smell it on her. Fever. The sickly sweet of rotten blood. When she finally lets him peek under the bandage, he peels it off as gently as he can, wincing more in proxy than she does in reality. 

The wound itself is dark, and the skin around it has assumed an ugly color. Jack establishes that she can move all her fingers, then makes her do it again. Once he’s taken a thorough amount of time cleaning it with a pile of cloth and a pot of hot water, and assesses that her fever hasn’t broken, but isn’t dangerously high, her patience for his fawning runs thin. He finds himself back on the floor level of the brothel, frowning at the volume of the music, wondering if she’s managed to fall asleep yet upstairs, listening to Featherstone’s next idiotic venture. 

“Why shouldn’t Nassau have a hat shop?” Featherstone asks, already ruddy with drink.

Jack is doing his best to listen. Really, he is. Their only hope at this point is for Jack to succeed in luring the man from the _Colonial Dawn_ ; he can think of no other option. But at the moment, Reed and his circle are exceedingly difficult to ignore. 

“A bloody gash for a bloody gash,” Reed crows. He’s found his voice now, it seems. 

Jack is tapping the table loud enough to be aware of it, and is angry enough not to stop. A dull roar is rising in his ears.

Featherstone drones on. Jack’s eyes scan the room, and settle on an unexpected sight. 

Vane. Slouched in a candlelit alcove, one whore in his lap, another at his side. He isn’t paying them much mind, though the red-haired girl is certainly doing her best, her head lolling in his shoulder, tits bare and pressed to his side. 

Vane's eyes are on Reed. And his gaze is hard. 

“Jack.” Featherstone nudges his wrist. “ _Jack_.”

Jack tunes back in, forces a rictus of a smile. 

“You were saying?”

Weeks pass. They secure another prize, then another, the biggest yet. The efficacy of it all, the sheer amount of cargo lands them solidly in Eleanor Guthrie’s good graces. The _Ranger_ crew are Nassau’s darlings again. 

Jack isn’t blind. Or naïve. Beyond the improved leads, and the status bump, and the substantial benefits to the men, he knows what _that_ means to Vane. 

But even if Anne’s made peace with it, and even if Jack has, most days, tonight he can’t stand it anymore. He sneaks off and finds a quiet spot on the porch by a patch of honeysuckle, nurses his headache with rum. 

Normally he wouldn’t consider being outside. Not in this heat. But a night breeze keeps him cool enough; keeps the mosquitos off, at least. 

Thunderclouds are piling up in the north. Occasionally lightning flashes, illuminating the sea. The rain will start soon, but for now, the lazy saw of crickets and the faraway crash of the waves almost lull him to sleep. 

Then somewhere behind him: the thud of fist and flesh. A low, moaning gurgle. 

Jack bolts upright and looks back and sees Vane, his hand clamped over a man’s mouth, knifing him in the dark. 

Jack has never seen him at work like this. Not outside of battle, anyways. It’s rapid, brutal, wet jabs up under the protection of the ribcage, sluicing guts and organs. 

The man is clearly dead, or dying, but still. Black blood makes a long drooling line when Vane finally slips the blade from the mess.

Jack is sure he didn’t move, but treacherously, the chair beneath him creaks. 

Jack freezes. He’s unarmed, and painfully aware of it.

Vane sees him. He must see him. Jack can’t make out his expression in the gloom, but when the man slides to the floor, his slack-jawed face is clear in the moonlight. 

Reed.

For a long moment, Vane is still.

Then he bends down, wipes the knife on Reed’s shirt—one side, then the other—and sheathes it. He turns back into the tavern without a second glance.

_Flint_ , the crew suggests darkly. _Flint, or Flint’s men—or not. Someone will pay._

A cold wind whips up from the sea. The storm had finally broken the night before, ending three weeks of oppressive heat, but threatening green clouds linger over Nassau. 

And here they are, all out on the crag: the crew, and Jack, and Anne, and a few whores, pretending to cry. And Vane.

This is interesting, Jack thinks, as they clumsily lower Reed’s corpse into the hole, swaddled in a sail. 

A secret. Leverage, freely given, and without hesitation. 

Vane knows that Jack knows. That Jack told Anne. And that they, two outspoken malcontents, now both present a unique threat to him: the ability to redeem themselves with the crew, and to see Vane lose his captaincy, his ship, or worse. 

But Jack isn’t talking. Neither is Anne. Her eyes are hard, her shoulders square as Reed’s body disappears under shovelfuls of dirt, and Jack knows.

He’ll no longer be waking up in a cold sweat, pawing at the empty spot beside him. He’ll no longer wonder, when she wanders off into the market, if this is the last time he’ll see her walk away. And when her half of the coin reappears in the little chest, he won’t be surprised. 

Anne is going nowhere. 

Things have changed.

After Reed, Jack fantasizes about Vane. Not in the way he did before—sensory memories of rough shoves in the shadows, quick fucks in the galley. Now there are emotions. There are _storylines_ , god help him. But all Jack’s brain does is make stories, and this one is a good one. 

Vane finding them both _before_. Before Anne could fight, before Jack could swindle, when their ribs were showing and Jack could still lie to Anne without her knowing, about how he afforded the room, the gruel, the shoes on her feet. If Vane had found them that winter in London when they were younger, less set in their ways. If Vane had waited for them then as he seems to be now, with strange patience, as they ranted and railed and hated him. Sheltering them, killing for them—waiting, until they came around. 

Jack wouldn’t have wanted it in reality. He doesn’t want it now. But that doesn’t stop a gut-punch orgasm at the thought of it: Vane, wet with gore, tumbling into bed with them in that freezing room on Bayswater, gathering them to himself, stopping everything that happened to them there with brutal, easy finality. 

As he rides it out he opens his eyes to Anne’s face, inches from his on the pillow. Her eyes are keen and knowing.

“Anne,” Vane says, lifting the flap of their tent.

Jack is fucking her on a rickety desk, its legs skidding in the sand.

Vane looks at them for a moment, and says nothing. He leaves. 

The next time he walks in on them, in a rented room on Antigua, Anne is on top. She doesn’t look up, like if she doesn’t see him, she doesn’t know he’s there. 

This time Jack can hear his bootsteps enter, stop. And... silence. 

Jack cranes back, exasperated, and nods to a chair. 

_Sit the fuck down_ , he says, without speaking.

Vane does.

The lines begin to blur. When there’s drink involved Anne starts initiating when he’s already in the same space as them, like she’s daring him to step in, swag up, force them, confirm her suspicions so she can slice his dick off like she wants to. 

But Vane never interferes. Never comments. He watches, intent, and says nothing, before or after or otherwise.

For a while it seems like this is what it will be. This strange voyeurism. It gets to the point where he’ll see their bad sex too, Jack guesses, because tonight Anne can’t hit her pace, is in the sour kind of mood where a pointer could just as easily result in a twist to the balls and a “fuck you” as a better lay.

In any case, Jack is distracted enough with her cock in his ass to not see or hear Vane approach. He just opens his eyes just in time to see him edging up behind Anne, watching her carefully, like an animal. Anne knows he’s there; she doesn’t bolt or stab him when his body finally reaches hers.

When she doesn't buck him off, his hands come up to settle on her hips. He peers down over her shoulder, at her white-knuckled grip on her knife.

“All right?” he asks. Her cheeks are pink and splotchy and she snarls, but nods. 

Jack knows, because he knows, that Vane wouldn’t rub against her, grope her, even let her know he’s hard, but fuck. He’s interested. Jack knows.

Anne gives a hard thrust. Hard enough for Jack to grab the sheets.

“Yeah,” Vane says, and christ, Jack can _hear_ how wet she is. When she starts fucking him again, slow and stuttered, Vane gathers the veil of her hair in his hand and tucks it on the opposite side. He tilts her head the slightest bit, so he can rest his chin on her shoulder. So he can watch.

Jack gets the distinct sense that he’s less admiring him—Jack, who is taking it pretty well, he thinks—and more admiring Anne. How she fucks so hard, so brutally. Like a man. Jack feels some misplaced sense of pride, like he always does when someone recognizes how wonderful she is. Isn’t that fucked.

“Can you make him come like this?” Vane asks, like Jack’s not even there.

Jack has to close his eyes so he doesn’t, like, right _now_. 

Anne can, for the record. Which is more than Vane can say. Vane doesn’t even seem to mind.

She’s nodding, Jack assumes. He’s still squeezing his eyes shut, fuck. He’s squeezing the base of his dick just to hold on a little longer.

“Make him, then,” he hears Vane say, very low. Jack can’t hear whatever he says next, because it’s for Anne alone, in her ear, his eyes flicking down to look at Jack while his hands brace on her hips, not controlling the pace, but giving her a little more power. More shove. 

When Jack comes all over himself it’s sudden, and absolutely no surprise. But Anne-

Her head falls back on Vane’s shoulder. She seizes up, grunts, so quiet, in her throat. She never comes from this—or just this, anyways—but she just did. She’s rocking forward against Jack, hips rolling, less the movement of fucking, more her body riding the wave of it.

Jack has never seen Vane like this. Still, so still on the outside—eyes completely fucking wild. It occurs to Jack, not distantly, that he wouldn’t mind being fucked again. He wouldn’t mind if Vane fucked him right now.

Vane gives him a sharp warning glance, like he could read his mind, then his eyes drift to Anne. She’s standing there, flush with orgasm, not covering herself, though Jack suspects she wants to. She looks defiant, and the smallest bit curious, her ridiculous wooden cock hanging down between her legs.

Vane withdraws. Looks away at- what? Nothing. The wall of the tent.

“Fuck,” he barks suddenly, wiping his hand down his face. 

He leaves.

Jack and Anne sit together on the high waterline, just above the black line of seagrass. The night is moonless, so dark they can barely see the line between land and sea, just the bubbly froth it leaves behind. Far away a few stragglers are hooting, swaggering, the bonfire burned down to embers.

“I know he wanted it,” Anne says. Her voice is barely audible, quiet in the wind.

“Of course he did.” Jack rips up a handful of grass from the sand.

“So why’d he go.”

Jack moves past the implication that she seems to wish he didn’t. 

“Oh, I can guess. Can’t you?” 

She’s silent. So, as they often do, he talks through his thoughts out loud, and she processes her own. 

“As… unusual as we may be, we’re not without value. _You’re_ not without value,” he corrects. Let’s be honest. “The more entangled he allows himself to become with whatever _this_ is, the higher the likelihood we walk off at the next port and disappear, for reasons unknown to him.” 

Her expression doesn’t change, but he knows she’s listening.

“Or, you know, we plot to kill him. He’d probably prefer the latter to the former, actually.”

Still, she says nothing. 

“Anne,” Jack entreats. “If you do want to kill him, I’ll- well, I’ll certainly help as I am able. Carrying the body, or something.” Her eyes soften the slightest bit. “But if that’s not what you want… what _ever_ you want, your... tempestuous attitude towards him is, no doubt, confusing at best.”

Her jaw pulls tight. She hugs her knees.

“I am what I am,” she says. 

“I know.” He glances at her fondly. 

Finally, she looks back, and isn’t angry. He wants so badly to kiss her. He wants it all the time. 

“Vane will straighten himself out, or he won’t. What matters,” he says, gently, but urgently, “is what you want.” 

Anne rests her chin on her knees. She digs the heels of her boots in the sand, kicking them deeper and deeper. 

They sit in companionable silence. 

For as quick as Jack’s brain is, as pleasantly as he can feel it leap to an argument before anyone else has seen it, as easily as it suggests the right phrase, the right word, to slip in before the mood’s changed, it simply isn’t good at this.

In battle, he’s mostly useless. When cannons are booming and men are screaming, it isn’t, exactly, that he’s afraid. It isn’t even that he doesn’t know what to do.

He simply isn’t good at it. His brain simply cannot keep up. 

Not like Anne and Vane, who wade through corpses like a seal cuts through water. 

And it’s just Jack’s luck, really, that just when he’s possibly managed to sort out the biggest and most terrifying and potentially most exciting problem of his life, he’s stunned with a well-timed smash of his head on the rail, and looks up through a haze to see some growling dull-eyed fuck leering down at him, ready to skewer him on a sword. 

Well. That’s that.

But then, it isn’t. The man’s head and neck swing to the side with a sickening crack, caught on the receiving end of a broken spar, and the body’s barely hit the deck before Vane is on him, finishing him off with an overhead cleave to the skull.

Vane is awful, teeth bared and blood-soaked, snarling as he works to dislodge axe from bone, and Jack blinks through a film of gore to see Anne, ten feet away on the quarterdeck. 

Anne, who wouldn’t have made it in time, ghost white with relief.

Jack never sleeps well. Whatever manic machine propels him during the day runs him ragged at night. 

He paces the streets, the cottage paths, the beaches, and endures the insults, though by now most recognize him as part of the _Ranger_ crew, and generally give him wide berth.

Small mercies.

It’s well after midnight when the throbbing ache in his head forces him back to the tent. He resents being forced to retreat, resents the hours of lying awake he’s about to subject himself to, but can’t help being a little relieved to step inside. Inside it’s cool and dim. The sound of the waves is muffled to a dull roar. 

Anne is already here, asleep in their pile of blankets. She looks small without her coat and hat. Her hand is curled under her chin. 

Vane is here too. He’s awake, half propped up, a bottle of rum loose in his hand. He doesn’t look much better than Jack feels. 

They lost six men taking the _Grafton_. On top of that, they not only need to find another navigator; Vane needs to decide on the scapegoat he’ll throw to the crew as Reed’s murderer. And, Jack suspects, being in Nassau—there’s always the urge for him to slink off and call on the Guthrie woman. Maybe he already has. His hair is unkempt. He seems very, very put out.

His eyes slide to Jack when he enters, but he says nothing. 

Jack blows out the lamp and toes his boots off as quietly as he can, removing his belt with care for the clicking buckle. This is the delicate part.

“Darling,” he says, warming his hand on the clothed ridge of Anne’s hip. Nothing sudden or rough.

She stirs, makes a sleeping sound. She would be ashamed of it, Jack thinks, of how young it sounded, if she were awake. It’s one thing for him to hear it. Quite another, for Vane.

She makes room for Jack, though—and he freezes, when she moves forward instead of back. She blearily seeks out Vane’s arm, his body, scooting forward to press herself against his side. She beds down, her head on his chest, breathing the hard funny breaths of someone who was never really awake to begin with, and is already sleeping again.

Jack’s eyes are starting to adjust. He can make out the outline of Anne, tucked under Vane’s arm, and feels a strange thrill. It isn’t erotic, he thinks. At least not entirely. It’s a warmth that comes with seeing someone he loves feel safe. A grip loosens, infinitesimally, on his heart. 

He’s known since the day he met her that he can’t protect her like she protects him. Not in the same way, anyways. That his words, while golden, can only get them so far, and one day they may not suffice, as the ache in his head reminds him. 

But Charles. Charles can be that for her.

He hasn’t moved, as still as he was when Jack came in the tent. Then, Jack can see it: his hand slowly comes up. Rests on Anne’s head.

Outside the waves crash, hiss, recede. 

Jack turns into his pillow and, finally, goes to sleep.

Jack hates St. Croix. Hates the heat, hates the people, hates the stink of opium and the red, oily light.

“It was a mistake.”

“He ripped him off.” Oh. So Anne is the special kind of angry where she’ll actually give her opinion. 

“A misunderstanding,” Jack adjusts, very charitably, he thinks. “Of which Simmons is fully aware, and which I have every assurance won’t be repeated. I’ll thank you both not to-”

But Charles has already jerked his chin at the door, and Anne is already through it and gone.

“Treat me like a child!” It all comes out in a rush. Jack slams the table with both his hands, leaning forward to brace himself on it. 

He exhales, lets his head hang between his shoulders. His blunt fingernails dig into the varnish. He almost laughs. It’s almost funny.

“I am not your fucking ward, Charles,” he says finally. He looks up at him. “I am not your wife.”

Charles is impassive, lighting up a smoke. If he’d laughed at him, in that moment, Jack doesn’t know what he’d do. 

Jack peers down to search his eyes, ready for a fight, but when Charles meets them, he detects no lack of respect there. No pity. Only anger. Deep, feral anger, and a firm belief that a slight against Jack is a slight against him. Against all of them.

“No,” Charles agrees. “You’re not.”

Jack isn’t sure if they can communicate, because they’re animals, but of different species.

It turns out, though, that they can. They enjoy fucking Jack, watching Jack be fucked, divining ideas, wordlessly holding him down for each other, holding him still, using his body, which would unsettle Jack more if it didn’t make him dizzy with desire. They don’t interact with each other when it’s happening, not in any way that involves words or touch, so Jack bears the brunt of their attention—their frustration, he senses, with having him, but not each other. 

He’s never come so often, or limped so much.

In their usual room, Jack is drinking. Charles is smoking in bed, bloodied from a brawl on the beach, but not enough to slow him down too much. He’s listening to Jack amicably enough, sometimes in the way that means he’s amused. 

Twilight has dimmed the space. Outside the windows, Nassau is coming alive. It’s quite something, to have the weight of Charles’s attention on him. To feel his eyes when he boasts, laughs, then feel them, when Jack takes a deep swig of rum, move down to the half-hard dick in his pants.

Charles quirks his eyebrow.

Jack shrugs. It’s not even that he’s particularly turned on right now. It’s proximity to Charles, sure, but familiarity too, and attention, and drink, and the smell of clove smoke and salt and dirty hair which Jack now associates with Charles and, by extension, with a kind of excited, nervous adrenaline. 

They’ve been in Nassau for three days, and Charles has yet to crawl to Eleanor Guthrie. Has yet to even glance at her door. So yes. Jack feels good. 

“It is my talent,” he volunteers. “And my curse.”

Charles leans over to stub out his cigar.

“Like a dog,” he suggests, exhaling a smooth stream of smoke. Jack finds his dick doesn’t mind that comparison at all.

It’s exhilarating, to be so frank. Exhilarating enough to not even be that let down, really, when Charles says, “Personally, I’m not in the mood.“

Jack knows that Charles is on the mend, not a little drunk, and that there many other perfectly serviceable reasons why this statement may actually be true. That’s fine. Jack doesn’t mind waiting. Or, more accurately, being told to wait. 

Charles settles back against the pillows, considering him in that disarming way he has where mystically, the more vulnerable his posture, the more thuggish he seems. Jack, for whom machismo has always been anathema, finds it intoxicating.

“But don’t let that stop you,” Charles says. 

There’s a malicious edge to it, typical of most interactions with Charles. But there’s a playful air too—or, at least, a teasing one. 

Flirtation, Jack realizes. Anne has many talents, but this is not one of them. For a moment, being with Charles feels less like being in bed with a murderer, and more like messy back room fumblings with the neighbor’s older brother. 

Though it’s hard to forget that Jack did, in fact, see Charles slit a man from groin to sternum that morning, his viscera spilling out onto the deck. Somehow, that in no way dampens the mood.

So, Jack gropes himself over his pants. He does love to perform. And Anne, as absolutely delightful as she is, usually has more interest in the mechanics of the deed than the art of it. But the way Charles is watching him now, eyes dark and steady, suggests to Jack that they might be different in that regard.

Jack spits in his hand and gets to work. It’s lewd, the wet sound of his dick fucking his fist, audible over the music and woozy laughter below.

“You know what would be helpful?” he suggests as casually as he can, given that he’s fully aware how he looks.

Charles’s face is inscrutable.

“If you…” Jack gestures at his shirt.

For a moment there’s no reaction, and Jack’s stomach hangs in suspense. This is sweet in its own way, the teeter before a very long fall. 

Then Charles pushes air out of his nose, barely a laugh. And he pulls it up.

Jack swallows, painfully. Warmth floods through him. Part of it, of course, is the muscle, the pleasing broadness of him, the plane of dark skin, the bruises and scars. But also, that Charles is deigning to let Jack get off on looking at him. Better still: that he did what Jack wanted. 

And the fact that he is watching Jack very intently now. Not his dick. His face.

It’s that, really, that makes Jack wet his lips. Push a little further. 

“I mean,” he chances, somewhat breathless. “While you’re at it.”

Charles’s eyebrow rises, but he uses both hands, opens the fastening of his pants. Lets Jack look at his cock, thick and fat where it lies, mostly soft, on his belly.

It doesn’t take long after that. When he’s close Charles leans in and takes over, jerking him roughly until Jack-

“Good,” Charles says, and Jack comes all over him.

Jack almost longs for the days before Charles and Anne trusted each other, because he can’t believe how much they like to nap. Sprawled out in bed for hours in various states of undress, gauzy curtains barely moving in the still summer breeze. How _awful_ it is, to be cooped up inside for long, buzzing afternoons. Jack will sweat it out and read the same book twice, sober and bored, then they’ll want to be out all night, drinking and fucking, when he’s finally ready to turn in.

And they don’t mind the heat. Of course they don’t.

“Crack the window then,” Anne suggests crankily, just as Charles grumbles “Shut up,” rolling over, going still again.

They usually sleep piled together now. Anne is cautious, permitting affection rather than inviting it, but Charles is easy. He doesn’t think twice about a hard slap on Jack’s thigh, a possessive tug in his hair as he walks by, about lazily dragging him back into bed when Jack’s finally decided to roll out of it. It’s less that he’s affectionate, Jack thinks, and more that he is unselfconscious: with Jack, he wants, so he takes. 

With Anne, though, he observes. In quiet moments Jack catches him watching her, learning her tells, like Jack once did. In the rare moments she approaches him for affection, he’s easy with it, like he was never waiting or interested to begin with, in a way she cannot chafe at or overthink. 

Daylight streams bright and clear through the window the first time Anne lets Charles eat her out. Jack always teases and fondles and talks talks talks until she’s growling and dragging him down but Charles bites, pushes, barely even bothers with warming her up in a way that the savage part of her seems to recognize and enjoy. He gets his mouth on her and she snarls a hand in his hair and twists and they both seem to enjoy that too. 

She will never let Charles fuck her. They both know this. But this act is different, acceptable, when they’re on equal footing. 

Anne watches him a little longer, his jaw working, thumbs pressed in her inner thighs, before her head falls back in Jack’s shoulder and her eyes slide closed and she’s fantasizing about something else. 

Charles’s eyes slide up to Jack’s. 

He’s smug. Knows Jack’s dick is trapped against his body, and there's not much he can do about it. Jack doesn’t care. He’s been hard so long he’s kind of giddy with it, which Charles seemed to recognize far before Anne. Jack doesn’t care. He laughs, helpless at how fucking turned on he is. 

The smile doesn’t leave Charles’s eyes when he looks back to Anne, settles in to make her come.

Sitting on the shore with Anne, Jack looks out at the sea, but doesn't really see it.

He’s seeing possibility. The future, folding out in front of them, more assured, maybe, than it’s ever been in their lives.

For the first time he can remember since they met, in the ten years they’ve known each other, Anne leans her head on his shoulder.

Jack wishes he were better at killing. ****

He doesn’t hate himself, or look down on his not-small amount of talents. They were hard won and he knows, within a hundred leagues, he is the only man like him. ****

But he wishes it all the same. For the first time in his life, he’s at a loss for words. He watches them move about in the same space, gibing, wonderful, and he can’t speak to them as he wants to. Can’t express devotion in a way he’s sure they’ll understand. ****

When he wakes from dreamless, drowning sleep between them in Port Royal, Dominica, Tortuga, to Charles’s nose in his shoulder, his arm slung heavy over his side, to Anne curled up at his front, her forehead close to his, her breathing long and slow- ****

He just has the trust that they know.

**Author's Note:**

> New to this fandom and honestly shocked there isn't more content for them!
> 
> I like Vane and Anne together bc I feel like they Get each other on a level a lot of other characters can't. Ocean ferals. I generally like the whole dynamic of this threesome, actually, bc I think Jack is the only one involved who would be attracted to the other two on a purely physical level. Vane is like 95% straight, Anne is like 95% gay, on paper neither of them should be into each other, or someone like Jack. So their relationship is based entirely on just really _liking_ each other, being compatible on more than a physical level, and then doing physical stuff bc it's fun, and comforting, and they love each other. I dunno, it just feels really honest! They cute.


End file.
